


Heavy Glow

by thetoastlives



Category: The Venture Bros
Genre: Gen, M/M, and smoking, pete hates himself tag, so its up to you, there may be some weird grammar or punctuation but nothing awful, theres no plot and no smut its literally just like pete being stupid, theres smoking, theres some heavily implied pete/billy but its not explicitly states
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-16
Updated: 2014-09-16
Packaged: 2018-02-17 15:51:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2315033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetoastlives/pseuds/thetoastlives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pete always gets up first- it's a habit.  The night sky is always be the backdrop for his first cigarette.  It had been as a teenager, to hide it from his mother.  In college, to escape the rooms of people he barely knew without question.  Now, to ruminate on his crimes against the boy with the broken halo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heavy Glow

Pete fills his lungs with cancer, closing his eyes and letting it slip back out through his nose.  He pretends it is controlled- he imagines that he controls it.  Here, leaning against the side of the trailer in the weaning, formidable dawn, he allows himself to pretend that he is the protagonist in his own life, that he is the main character in his story.  That he is not a backstabbing sidekick, a bad guy, a great betrayer of good and an annoying affront to its competency.

Even if Pete hadn’t become a total piece of shit, though, he still wouldn’t be important.  All the special shit about him- he’s albino.  The end.  He rode margins; He wasn’t a genius, by any measure, and he wasn’t a brute and he wasn’t a super powered maestro.  He didn’t even really have goals.  He was just... he was there.  If it weren’t for Billy, he knows, he would just be a slightly more noticeable face in the crowds of nameless people that fill up the streets in movies, the ones that don’t even show up in credits unless it’s in big blocks of names as identity wiping as the crowds themselves.  That scares him more than anything else, the prospect of not being important.  Sometimes he thinks it’s the only reason he cares about Billy so much- because Billy cares about him.

Pete looks down, closing his eyes.  He can feel the beaming light that nourishes all that is good and all that is great threatening to sear his face.  He pretends not to care- as if it doesn’t matter, as if his skin won’t blister and shrivel and peel after thirty minutes.  He screws up his mouth bitterly, taking a long drag and holding it as he squints on up into the hot pink clinging desperately to the horizon.  Selfish- he stares selfishly into the sun and he stays selfishly with Billy and if Billy could only peel his skin and make him squirm the way the sun peels his skin and makes him squirm then maybe he could finally get in some trouble.

Selfish and greedy always go hand in hand, Pete was always a money grubbing asshole.  Right from the start, exploiting a kid, running around on a moped promising to take him to a ‘hero’ Pete knew was a piece of human garbage.  And he stayed, afterwards- spending money on what he likes, sitting around while Billy works hard.  While Billy sacrifices shit he doesn’t even know about so that Pete can feel like he doesn’t belong in a trash can all the time.

Pete snorts softly, letting it out.

Billy. The shit he put Billy through, that kid was going to go to MIT if Pete hadn’t waltzed into his life and fucked everything up- like Pete fucks everything up.  Blame the cocaine, blame the fact that people actually thought he was attractive for once, blame the money- he screwed over that kid faster than Hitler could sell his grandmother to a scrooge down the river for a nickel.  And Billy didn’t even know, Billy doesn’t even remember how it was his fault he didn’t graduate with those OSI folks, how it was his fault he was missing a fucking hand.  And the kid had been right, you know? You can’t hide a hydrocephalic head with makeup.

So, there we are- Pete’s selfish, he’s greedy, he’s emotionally stunted.  And then there’s the drugs, he even let Billy save him from coke.  He’s using Billy- he’s eating up all he has until there’s nothing left.  He’s feeding on Billy’s greatness like the albino ringleader at the freakshow pretending like this whole fucking escapade isn’t degrading.  Maybe not freakshow- he probably doesn’t have the right to say that.  Billy isn’t a freakshow, not in the least, he’s...

Pete shakes his head, slow, blowing out the smoke.  The sun’s almost all the way up, now, he needs to get back inside if he knows what’s good for him, but he’s just... Really, he doesn’t know.  Its like he can feel the pressure boiling under him and he’s just sitting there holding Billy over his head so he won’t find out that Pete carried him straight onto a burner.  Billy would hate him- as big of a person as he was, he wouldn’t forgive Pete for ruining his life, right? He couldn’t, every time he’s remembered he’s given Pete this look, this how dare you look, this I thought you were my friend look.  

Pete takes a deep breath, dropping his cigarette and stamping it out with his foot.  He flicks his eyes back against the incoming light and hisses, turning and grabbing the door.  When he’s inside, hit hard with the smell of festering failure, he smiles slightly.  He really is a villain, isn’t he? And now he’s being selfish, again, he’s clinging to Billy like he deserves a friend like him. Pete shuffles off his flip flops and moves toward the mattress in the back of the trailer, sliding the door open slowly.

Billy can fake a kid pretty nice if you don’t stand too close, but when he’s asleep, he shows his age horribly.  All wrinkled skin and hair pulling away from his face like it can’t accept the loss of its youth.  Pete licks his lips, pushing the door the rest of the way open and leaning against the jamb.  He takes a deep breath and pretends this isn’t creepy fucking shit he’s doing, watching his whatever-Billy-is-to-him sleep.  He blinks, nodding softly for no real reason before turning back toward the kitchenette.  

Pete’s lips twitch and then he opens the fridge, pulling out some possibly expired eggs and the end pieces of bread they’ve been saving up for the next time Pete bought video games instead of groceries.  He flicks on the electric burner and starts making breakfast, playing pretend again and imagining that if he makes Billy’s eggs just right it’ll fix everything.

But villians, see- they never get what they want, not in the end.  No matter how bravely they defy the sunrise or how perfectly gooey their sunny side up eggs are.  Not when they do it over the guilt of the supposed child prodigy that they’re dragging down with them, not when they live in a trailer they don’t deserve and live off the skills of a friend they shouldn’t have.

Pete looks toward the door he left open with a smile.  He can kind of hear Billy rustling around- if he has a superpower, it should really be detecting food, hot damn.  He watches as someone the size of a child with the weight of the world on his shoulders shuffles into the main area of the trailer, waving a tired good morning as if Pete deserves it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so I'm not entirely my happiest with this, but Pete White slays me, and Pete White knowing that his inadequacy being put over Billy is wrong but doing it anyway and hating himself for it slays me worse. Title from By The Way by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, boy with the broken halo is from Sinister Kid by the Black Keys. Sorry if the canon is a little off, it's been a while since I watched Venture Bros and I mostly wrote this powered by residual feels.


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